Is Artificial Intelligence a Panacea?
The Corner Office
Wayne Moore
5/13/2024
We are currently witnessing another transitionary anomaly, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the nascent era of the dotcom bubble. Remember the results of that bubble popping? Do you remember a company called Boo.com? It spent almost $150 million on advertising before it sold a single piece of clothing over the web. From 1997 to 2001 dumb business models spread faster than Covid-19 would twenty years later. Fear of missing out (FOMO) drove millions of dollars of investments into all kinds of ridiculous scenarios like Pets.com and a myriad of others. Well, we certainly learned our lesson from the dotcom bubble burst didn’t we. Well, hold on.
Fast forward to 2024 – seems almost everyone in the medical device market has jumped on the bandwagon of artificial intelligence. It is the new lipstick to put on the pig of a marginal product. Does AI have uses in medical devices? Of course it does, it has the potential to make a great product even better. But simply hanging the label AI on a poor or marginally performing device does not cure essential performance weakness. Announcing you have integrated AI into an ultrasound system that produces sub-clinically acceptable images in order to perform the study more efficiently simply means that you will still produce a bad image- you just produce it faster. Look at the core performance of a system first, i.e., its safety and essential performance attributes, if these attributes stink then adding an AI algorithm that does not improve the stink is goofy and distracting. AI is not a panacea and won’t fix a dumb business model or a fundamentally underachieving product, it will just make you look silly for buying it.
Until next month,
Wayne